The Dallas County Administration Building, formerly the Texas School Book Depository, houses the Sixth Floor Museum. Photograph by Andrew J. Oldaker, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
DALLAS (AP) – The Sixth Floor Museum was closed Tuesday after a thwarted robbery attempt ended with a safe dangling from the back of a pickup truck outside the building that served as a perch for President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, authorities said.
A security officer was making rounds before dawn Tuesday when he noticed two men trying to get into another pickup near the building, said Dallas County sheriff’s spokeswoman Kim Leach.
The officer yelled at the men to stop, but they jumped into the pickup carrying the safe on a winch attached to the bed of the truck and drove toward the officer, who fired several shots, Leach said.
Although authorities don’t believe either suspect was struck by bullets, they lost control of the truck and crashed it into the sidewalk next to the building, leaving the safe hanging from the back of the vehicle, Leach said. They fled on foot and remained at large Tuesday afternoon, she said.
Leach said the officer wasn’t injured.
It wasn’t immediately clear what was in the safe and the investigation was continuing, Leach said.
Museum collections and historic materials were “safe and secure,” said museum spokeswoman Deborah Marine. She said the museum would reopen Wednesday.
The building was called the Texas School Book Depository when Lee Harvey Oswald was accused of shooting Kennedy from a window on the sixth floor on Nov. 22, 1963.
The first five floors now house Dallas County operations, with a separate area on the first floor to welcome museum visitors. The museum is on the sixth and seventh floors. Leach said the safe was removed from the first floor.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Paul King’s ‘Early Winter’ had wide exposure in the early ’20s. Image courtesy Rachel Davis Fine Art.
CLEVELAND – Spring has arrived in northeast Ohio, but a large Paul King painting titled Early Winter is expected to bring a flurry of bidding to Rachel Davis Fine Arts’ Decorative Arts and Fine Paintings Auction on May 8. LiveAuctioneers will facilitate Internet live bidding.
The oil on canvas on masonite painting, which measures 50 inches by 60 inches, was exhibited at the Art Association of Newport, 1923; 18th Annual Exhibition, City Art Museum, St. Louis, 1923; and the 19th Annual Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1919. Provenance also includes Grand Central Art Galleries, New York. The painting has a $15,000-$25,000 estimate.
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1867, King studied at the Buffalo Art Students’ League and first found employment as an illustrator for Harper’s and Life magazines. King then studied art in Holland. Upon returning King to the U.S., lived in Philadelphia and later joined the artist colony in Stony Brook on Long Island. He died there in 1947. Among the awards King won was the Altman Prize for best landscape in 1923.
More in keeping with the season at hand is a Benjamin Champney (1817-1907) Landscape With River at Sunset, which carries a $5,000-$8,000 estimate. The 20-inch by 16-inch oil signed painting shows some in-painting along the lower right edge.
Born in New Ipswich, N.H., Champney is synonymous with White Mountain paintings of the 19th century. In 1855 Champney became a founder of the Boston Art Club and its president in 1856. For 50 years he maintained a summer home and studio near Conway, N.H., which attracted many travelers from across the country.
More than 700 lots consisting of 19th- and 20th-century American and European paintings, prints and sculptures will be offered along with pottery and glass and furniture.
The Screen Siren Gallery includes the Travis Banton evening dress, 1934, of black silk and sequens. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. NEW YORK (AP) – The American woman’s claim to fame in the fashion world mirrors what the country’s roots are built on: freedom.
From the heiresses in the 1890s to the screen sirens of the 1940s – and, really, into the 21st century – it was American style icons who helped move fashion forward with new standards of beauty, sexuality, power and art, even if many of the best couturiers lived and worked across the Atlantic.
The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute celebrates this influence in its new exhibit American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.
“Whenever you think of America, you think about emancipation, modernity and progress, and American women because of their clothes are the ultimate symbol of progress and modernity,” said curator Andrew Bolton.
But while he could have singled out the most influential tastemakers of their day, that might have minimized the overall impact he thinks Americans had on global trends. “I didn’t want to pick out specific women. I wanted to celebrate the archetypes of American femininity,” Bolton added.
Visitors enter through a photographic recreation of Manhattan’s Washington Square arch, which, coming from the end of the 19th century, notes the complementary explosion of local architecture and apparel at that time. The first gallery represents the high, expensive, elaborate style of the young nation’s wealthiest women. They still bought their clothes in Paris, Bolton explained, but their look – and the American spin they put on it – was exported back to Europe via the characters in Edith Wharton and Henry James novels.
To best show off the heiress’ va-va-voom silhouette, Bolton selected low-cut ballgowns with tiny, nipped waists; provocative low bustlines; and rich fabrics. One of the most stunning came from the French House of Worth. The blue-and-cream gown was decorated with delicate mousseline and butterfly-themed embroidery.
The heiresses’ independent streak whet the appetite for the next generation’s more carefree style that would only be furthered with the athletic Gibson Girl, a creation of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, followed by the liberal bohemian, tough suffragist and fun-loving flapper. Then came the Hollywood starlet, who, with her mix of glamour and sophistication, has remained a muse for fashion designers around the world.
Back in 1924, the French designer Jean Patou specifically sought out Americans as models, running an ad in The New York Times looking for women who had to be “smart, slender, with well-shaped feet and ankles and refined of manner.”
That solidified the American woman’s place in the fashion hierarchy, said Bolton.
“What interested me a lot is the actual history; it’s about the American woman going through history and how she projected herself,” said Patrick Robinson, Gap’s executive president of global design, who served as the co-chair for exhibit’s star-studded opening gala that featured such tastemakers as Oprah Winfrey, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jennifer Lopez.
“To me, it’s the idea that she can say, ‘I can express myself!’ It’s pretty powerful when you look at it like that,” Robinson said. “From the flapper period through the screen-siren period – that’s when it changed. From our films, that’s when the world saw American fashion, American attitude, and they said, ‘I want to be that.’ And that’s still the way it is today.”
The exhibit ends with a video mash-up of familiar faces, past and present, who collectively embody the strong spirit woven into the look of the historical muses. Jackie Kennedy, Lady Gaga, Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Steinem and Michelle Obama are among the dozens of women whose faces flash on the walls to the soundtrack of – what else – Lenny Kravitz’s anthem American Woman.
The archetypes and the clothes, mostly from the Met’s recent acquisition of the Brooklyn Museum’s Costume Collection, that represent them:
– The Heiress
While the grande dames of high society often wore black, the younger heiresses – many newly married, others on the prowl for a husband – favored lighter colors. Examples of her gowns include a black one embroidered with black celluloid pailettes and shamrocks trimmed with gold lame and lace, and an icy blue one brocaded with white and blue stars, silver sequins and chiffon clouds.
– The Gibson Girl
This lanky, sporty style was introduced to the world in Gibson illustration in an 1890 issue of Life magazine. The women inspired by this image took up swimming, tennis, riding horses and bikes, and ice-skating, and they wore more practical fabrics such as cotton broadcloth and wool twill. While they kept their corsets on, they adopted some menswear looks, too, including button-down shirts.
– The Bohemian
Off with the corset! This liberated woman threw herself into cultivating the fine arts, and a byproduct of that was more creative, less restrictive clothing. An appreciation of details, including Art Nouveau prints and lace, was combined with a keenness of the jewel-tone Orientalist palette. Influences of classicism and even medievalism also are seen.
– The Patriot and the Suffragist
World War I furthered the suffragist movement as thousands of American women performed wartime service. They wore some military-inspired looks but maintained some femininity, which they thought could be used to their advantage. Their symbolic colors were purple, white, green and gold.
– The Flapper
Flappers smoked cigarettes, drank gin, went to work and partied at night – and had the wardrobe to do all that and more. Considered a turning point in fashion because the flapper was among the first American muses to be mimicked abroad, she made the most of her long, lean shape with chemise dresses, shorter hemlines and Art Deco beading that evoked the skyscrapers that also were becoming a worldwide symbol of the U.S. boom.
– The Screen Siren
The Hollywood star was more sophisticated and sexy than the flirtatious flapper, and she eagerly embraced her more shapely figure. The bias-cut silhouette that is now a staple of the red-carpet was a favorite then for the same reason: It clings to curves, while maintaining a glamorous, graceful vibe with little need for adornment.
American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity runs through Aug. 15.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
AP-ES-05-04-10 1650EDT
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Fashions from the Roaring ’20s are found in the Flapper Gallery. Pictured are a dress by Lanvin, 1923 (left), and one by another French designer, 1925. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – A long-awaited auction of ancient treasures salvaged from the sea opened Wednesday in the Indonesian capital – and then abruptly closed because there were no registered bidders.
The auction, announced barely a week ago, had been expected to fetch at least $80 million for a collection of more than 270,000 pieces of valuable ceramic pots, jewelry and crystals retrieved from a sunken Chinese ship dating to the 10th century.
But government organizers admitted they had not given enough notice to potential buyers. The $16 million security deposit was another likely deterrent.
Maritime Affairs Ministry official Sudirman Saad said he had heard from more than 20 interested parties overseas but none had followed up with a deposit by Tuesday’s deadline.
And so the auction was officially opened in the Maritime Affairs Ministry in Jakarta, in keeping with the schedule but with the knowledge there would be no bids.
“Because the absence of bidders in the first auction … we will propose a second auction,” Saad told reporters. “We will evaluate for the next auction whether the absence of bidders was due to the hefty deposit required to bid, as well as the short registration time as another reason.”
The treasure trove was salvaged in 2004 and 2005 from a wooden Chinese ship that sank more than 1,000 years ago in the Java Sea, at the time a key trade route linking Asia with Europe and Middle East. While most of the goods are fine white or green wares from northern and southern China, the vessel also held Egyptian artifacts and Lebanese glassware.
Christie’s was originally expected to hold an auction as early as 2007, but that fell through as the Indonesian government struggled to come up with regulations for the sale of sunken treasures found within Indonesian waters. The regulations finally in place require bidders to front up to 20 percent of the minimum price of the objects for sale – in this case, $16 million.
The regulations also stipulate that if an auction fails three times, the government can directly approach potential buyers, including other governments. China, for example, may be interested in recovering the treasures, as the bulk of the collection was Chinese, Saad said.
Adi Agung, director of PT Paradigma Putra Sejathera, the local company that conducted thousands of dives to help retrieve the artifacts from the shipwreck in the Java Sea discovered by Indonesian fishermen, was discouraged by the strict regulations that prevented Wednesday’s auction.
“There are so many sunken ships full of ancient treasures in Indonesia that invite many treasure-hunters, but the conditions are still not conducive for investment in this sector,” Agung said.
He said his company invested $10 million in its part of the government-licensed salvage project, working along with Belgium-based Cosmix Underwater Research.
When the auction does go ahead, the Indonesian government will take 50 percent of the proceeds, with the remainder shared among the salvagers.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
